- Location: Abbey Street, Melrose, Roxburghshire, TD6 9LG
- Opening times: 1 April to 30 September 9.30 am – 5.00 pm, 1 October to 31 March 10.00 am – 4.00 pm
- Entry: Adult £7.50, concession £6.00, child £4.50, various family prices including £21.50 for a family of 2 adults and 2 children.
- Access: Parking in town (charge may apply).
“If thou wouldst visit fair Melrose aright”, advised Sir Walter Scott in a poem, “Go visit it by the pale moonlight”.
Today, a visitor taking Scott’s advice can only snatch a nighttime view of Melrose Abbey from the street, what with it now being under the care of Historic Environment Scotland (HES) and only open during certain daylight hours. On the plus side, it is precisely thanks to HES that so many of the historic buildings that dot Scotland’s landscape are so well maintained and safe to visit at all. Case in point, at this time of writing they are operating restricted access to the abbey as much of it is currently closed for essential conservation. As such, admission fees during this time are approximately 50% of the prices stated above.
Melrose Abbey was established in 1136 when David I invited Cistercian monks from Rievaulx Abbey in Yorkshire to build a monastery in Scotland. David’s choice of location was ‘Mailros’, or Old Melrose, where an earlier monastery dating to the 600s produced such mediaeval Christian titans as St. Aiden, St. Boisol, and St. Cuthbert. For whatever reason, the monks instead chose a site a couple of miles west called Little Fordell, which in time became Melrose. David bequeathed the monks significant amounts of land and encouraged others to do the same, and Melrose Abbey soon became one of the wealthiest in Britain.
The abbey enjoyed nearly 200 years of tranquillity, but then the Scottish Wars of Independence kicked off in 1296 and Melrose, on the main road between Scotland and England, was constantly in the firing line. Much of the abbey, and indeed the town, was destroyed by Edward II’s army in 1322, and although it arose phoenix-like, it suffered a similar fate when attacked by Richard II’s troops in 1385. The process of rebuilding began again, now using rose-tinted stone quarried at the nearby Eildon Hills, and much of today’s ruins date from this version of the abbey. The abbey suffered one final wall-rattling assault in 1545 during the Rough Wooing, an Anglo-Scottish War started partly by Henry VIII and his unsuccessful attempt to get the Scottish Parliament to agree to a marriage between his eight-year-old son Prince Edward and the infant Mary Queen of Scots. However, as with all the great British abbeys the final nail in Melrose’s coffin was the Protestant Reformation. Unusually, the monks were permitted to remain at the abbey until they died out, with the last of them departing this veil of tears in 1590.
Robert Burns was suitably impressed with Melrose’s ‘far-fam’d glorious ruins’ when he visited in 1789 and J.M.W Turner painted Melrose Abbey in 1822, but, just as he had done with Loch Katrine, it was Sir Walter Scott who elevated the abbey to a must-see destination on any tour of Scotland by including it in several of his works, most notably The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) which features his nocturnal recommendation above. The fact that Britain’s then-Greatest Living Writer also built his magnificent Baronial home Abbotsford just down the road didn’t hurt the abbey’s visitor numbers either. Scott, incidentally, did more than just immortalise the abbey in verse, as in the 1820s he also oversaw extensive repair work.
Melrose Abbey comes with some serious built-in mythology. It was, for example, rumoured to be the resting place of Michael Scot, ‘the Wizard of the North’, who changed the course of the River Tweed with his staff, split a single peak into three, thus creating the Eildon Hills, and petrified a coven of witches, thus creating the Long Meg and Her Daughters stone circle in Cumbria. The historical Scot, a multi-lingual scholar and mathematician in the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, was no less impressive. A stone coffin exhumed in 1812 was said by some to be his. The abbey’s graveyard was also the lair of the twelfth century ‘Hound Priest’, a far-from-holy man who preferred wicked ways to the Good Book and who terrorised the town as a vampire until the monks were finally able to destroy him. First recorded in 1198, this story is possibly Scotland’s first encounter with the Undead.
Perhaps the greatest legend associated with the abbey is the one that turned out to be true. It had long been rumoured that the heart of Robert the Bruce was buried somewhere in the site, and sure enough a casket containing a human heart was unearthed beneath the Chapter House floor in 1921. It was reburied and believed lost until it was rediscovered during excavations in 1996. Although not subjected to anything as conclusive as a DNA test, the heart is believed to be Bruce’s as there is no record of any other heart being buried there. The heart was reinterred in 1998, and a plaque now marks the spot (the rest of Bruce is buried in Dunfermline Abbey).
Destination or Diversion?
I probably spent about an hour at Melrose Abbey, but I am loathe to dismiss it as a diversion as I am sure I would have spent longer had I been able to access all areas, especially as I hoped to photograph some the building’s intricate carvings and sculptures. I did attempt to get a picture of the abbey’s best-known gargoyle, a bagpipe-playing pig, but the zoom on my iPhone wasn’t up to the task. Anyway, I’m classing it as an honorary destination, and one that I hope to return to once it is fully open again.
